Part 20 (1/2)
”On the other hand, Mexico is filled with fighters. So much has oppression done for the peon; it has taught him the business of fighting.
Now, I grant you, she is a nation composed of warring factions topped by a lamentably weak provisional government. _But_ with practically every Spanish-American over here actually partic.i.p.ating in a movement for Mexico, all those various factions will coalesce, as tiny brooklets flow together to form the mighty torrent.”
”Still, she's a big country to lick,” Elfigo pointed out, chiefly to see what Holly would say.
”Ah, but Mexico does not comprehend that fact! And, in the same breath, neither does this country, as a whole, comprehend how big a country is Mexico to lick! Give a Mexican soldado a handful of beans a day and something to shout _Viva_ for, and he can and will fight indefinitely. If I mistake not, it will shortly behoove this country to temporize, to make certain concessions. Whether those concessions extend so far as to cede these three States back to Mexico, I cannot hazard a prediction. I can see, however, where it is not at all improbable that New Mexico and Arizona may be considered too costly to hold. Texas,” he smiled, ”Texas remembers too vividly her Alamo.
Mexico, if she is wise, does not want Texas.”
”I heard yesterday there's some talk amongst the Americans about organizing home guards. We can't stand another postponement, Holly; it might give them time to pull off something like that. Little Luis Medina told me he heard a target marker for the San Bonito rifle club say something about it. He heard the members talking. You know they're using government rifles and ammunition. It would be a h.e.l.l of a note to put things off till every town had a home guard organized.”
”I can see no necessity for putting things off,” said Holly calmly. ”So far as I can learn, we are practically ready, over here. Ah! Here comes our charming neighbor from Sunlight Basin. Perhaps, Elfigo, it would be as well for you to disappear from the premises.”
”Oh, I want to meet her,” Elfigo smiled easily. ”It'll be all right; I just came after water for my radiator, anyway. She's dry as a bone.
I opened the drain c.o.c.k and let her drain off and stood a fine chance of freezing my engine too, before I got on past the puddle far enough to be safe!”
”It was, as a matter of fact, a very grave mistake to come here at all,”
Holly told him with a courteous kind of severity. ”I fear you greatly underestimate the absolute necessity for extreme caution. The mere fact that we have thus far elicited nothing more than a vague curiosity on the part of the government, does not excuse any imprudence now. Rather, it intensifies the need for caution. For myself--”
”Oh, anybody is liable to run dry, out here on the desert, Holly. If all the Secret Service men in the country, and I know of one or two that's been nosing around, were to come and find me here, they couldn't say I hadn't a good, legitimate reason for coming. I had to come. I didn't want to run on to any one from that inquest, and I had to see you. I wanted to put you wise to the stand we're taking on the Estan Medina affair. We can't help if that somebody b.u.mped him off, but--”
”You can fill your water bag at the well, since that is what you came for; and I should strongly advise you to terminate your visit as soon as it is consistent with your errand to do so.”
”Oh, don't crab my meeting a pretty girl, Holly! Introduce me, and I'll take the water and go. Be a sport!” Elfigo had picked up his five-gallon desert bag, but he was obviously waiting for Helen May to ride up to the house.
To Starr, crouched behind on a rock on the ridge that divided the Sommers place from the hidden arroyo where he had first seen trace of the automobile, Elfigo's att.i.tude of waiting for Helen May was too obvious to question. A little, weakling offspring of Hope died then in his heart. He had tried so hard to find some excuse for Helen May, and he had almost succeeded. But his gla.s.ses were too strong; they identified Elfigo Apodaca too clearly for any doubt. They were too merciless in showing Starr that beside Elfigo stood the man who had visited Helen May the day before.
Recognition of the man came with something of a shock to Starr. He had heard of Holman Sommers often enough, though he had never seen him. He had heard him described as a ”highbrow” who wrote scientific articles, sometimes published in obscure magazines, read by few and understood by none. A recluse student, he had been described to Starr, who knew Todd Sommers by sight, and who had tagged the family as being too American for any suspicion to point their way.
As often happens, Starr had formed a mental picture of Holman Sommers which was really the picture of a type made familiar to us mostly by our humorists. He had imagined that Holman Sommers, being a ”highbrow,” was a little, dried-up man with a bald head and weak eyes that made spectacles a part of his face; an insignificant little man well past middle life, with a gray beard, Starr saw him mentally. He should have known better than to let his imagination paint him a portrait of any man, in those ticklish times. But they were Americans, which was disarming in itself.
And the plump sister, who had talked for ten minutes with Starr when he called at the ranch one day to see if they had any stock they wanted to sell, had further helped to ward off any suspicion.
Now that he knew, by the smoking jacket and the slippers and the uncovered thatch of jet-black hair, that this man must be Holman Sommers; when he saw Elfigo Apodaca there, seated and talking earnestly with him, as he could tell by the gestures with which they elaborated their speech; when he saw Helen May riding in to the ranch, he had before him all the outward, visible evidence of a conference. The only false note, to Starr's way of thinking, was the brazenness of it. They must, he told himself, be so sure of themselves that they could snap their fingers at risk, or else they were so desperately in need of conferring together that they overlooked the risk. And that second explanation might easily be the true one, in view of Estan Medina's death and the possible consequence to the Alliance.
Starr was hampered by not hearing anything that was being said down there at that homey-looking ranch house, where everything was clearly visible to him through his field gla.s.ses. But even so it did not require speech to tell him that Elfigo Apodaca had never before met Helen May Stevenson, and that Holman Sommers was not overeager to introduce him to her. Starr, watching every movement of the three when they came together, frowned with puzzlement. Why had they been strangers until just now?
He saw the three stand and talk for perhaps two minutes; commonplace, early-acquaintance nothings, he judged from their faces and actions. He saw Helen May offer Holman Sommers the package she carried; saw Holman take it negligently and tuck it under his arm while he went on talking.
He saw Helen May turn then and go around to the door, which was opened effusively by the plump sister whom he knew. He saw the two men go to the well, and watched Elfigo fill the water bag and go away down the uneven trail to where his automobile stood, perhaps a quarter of a mile nearer the main road. When he turned his gla.s.ses from Elfigo to the house, Holman had gone inside, and the two women were out beyond the house admiring a flock of chickens which Maggie called to her with a few handfuls of grain.
There seemed no further profit in watching the Sommers house, and Starr was about to leave his post when he saw the dingy, high-powered roadster of the sheriff come careening up the trail. He came near upsetting his machine in getting around Apodaca's big car, but he negotiated the pa.s.sing with some skill and came on to where he met Elfigo himself sweating down the trail with his full five-gallon water bag.
Here again Starr wished that he could hear as well as he could see. That the sheriff had seized the opportunity to place Elfigo under arrest, he knew well enough, by faces and gestures, just as he had known of Elfigo's introduction to Helen May. But here were no polite nothings being mouthed. Elfigo was talking angrily, and Starr would have given a great deal to hear what he was saying; calling it an outrage, he supposed, and heaping maledictions on the stupidity of the law.
The sheriff did not seem to pay much attention to what Elfigo was saying beyond pulling a pair of handcuffs from his coat pocket, and tossing them to his prisoner--with the invitation to put them on, Starr knew very well, having himself done the same thing more than once. Still talking furiously, Elfigo obeyed, and then was invited to climb in beside the sheriff, who stooped and did something with one of Elfigo's stylishly trousered legs; manacled him to something in the machine, Starr guessed. From which he also gathered that Elfigo's remarks must have been pretty strong.
The sheriff started on, ran to where he could turn without upsetting, and backed the car around as though his errand were done. Quick work it had been. Evidently Sheriff O'Malley had attended the inquest with a blank warrant in his pocket, for fear Elfigo might take alarm and give them the slip. He must have been on the way back when he had either seen Elfigo's car on the Sommers trail, or else had noted where it had turned off and had come up the trail in a purely investigative spirit. However that might be, he had not let the chance slip. Which was characteristic of Sheriff O'Malley, essentially a man of action.
Starr should have been glad. Perhaps he was, though he did not look it as he went back to where Rabbit was browsing on whatever he could get while he waited for his master. Elfigo in jail even for a few days would be an advantage, Starr believed. It would set the rest to buzzing, so that he could locate them with less delay. But at the same time--
”If it came to a showdown right now, I'd have to take her along with the rest,” he came up squarely against his real problem. ”She's got it coming; but it's h.e.l.l, all the same!”